#4 The Placebo Effect - How Faith Alone Can Heal You
Today, we delve into the mysterious placebo effect and explore how the power of faith alone can sometimes lead to complete healing. I'm sure you have heard of the placebo before. The fact that sometimes people miraculously heal after just taking a fake pill that actually didn't contain any active ingredient. And nowadays, medication or any medical procedure has to be tested against a placebo group because sometimes the people who are only taking the placebo have even better results than the people taking the real medication.
But the placebo effect is not effective only for medication but it can be applied to surgery as well. The story of Dr. JB Mosley that appeared in the New York Times in the year 1994 is really incredible. Dr. Mosley wanted to see if he would be able to treat patients with a fake surgery. And so, Dr. Mosley found 10 volunteers with arthritis in their knee. Two of them actually received the real surgery, and eight of those volunteers only received a fake surgery. Fake surgery in the sense that Dr. Mosley actually made incisions with the scalpel into their knee and then sewed them up. So, at the end of the operation, all 10 people felt the pain after the surgery and thought that they were the ones receiving the real surgery. When Dr. Mosley saw the patients in a few weeks, actually all 10 of them completely recovered from their arthritis.
And so, if sometimes the group receiving placebo actually heals better than the ones with the real medication, and if you can perform just a fake surgery making the people believe that they received the real one and completely heal their illness, we have to ask what is actually the role of medication or surgery in the healing process and how much of it actually happens only in our head. What is the real power of our mind to heal ourselves?
Dr. Joe Dispenza, who has done incredible research in the field of neuroscience and how we use our mind to heal our body, says that if you can imagine something really vividly and experience the emotion of reaching that goal before you actually reach it, your brain will start to change your body as if this thing has already happened. I have seen it happen in my own body when I was just imagining with my mind, visualizing my immune system killing my tumor, my tumor getting smaller, and it actually started to get smaller. Then visualizing myself receiving the final MRI scan and reading that it's completely clear and I healed, and then experiencing the very same event in my real life. But what was essential in this process was the faith that I could actually do it. I had unshakable faith that it was possible and you can apply this to anything in your life. It's all about the faith that you can, that something is possible and then about the pictures that we create in our mind.
When I did my hypnotherapy training with the world-renowned and amazing hypnotherapist, Paul McKenna, he shared a story about his client who was in love with a woman but was too shy to even ask her out. He just thought that she was amazing and he was nothing, and that a woman like this would never even go out with him, so there was no point in trying. And as he didn't believe it was possible, obviously it was not possible because he was never even going to ask. And so, first, Paul, with hypnotherapy, worked on his beliefs and changed them to something that was actually a handsome man and that he was actually very interesting and amazing. If he asked her out, she would definitely say yes. Yes, it's possible. He was able to believe that.
Then Paul started to work with the image he was creating in his mind. When he asked how he saw this woman, he already saw the eyes of his client just raising up, and you could see he imagined her as something iconic, this huge icon, almost unreachable, amazing, something that was out of reach, very far away, very high up. And so, again using hypnotherapy, he shrunk this image of this woman to a size that was even smaller than him and just made it something that was achievable, that was okay, that was on the same level. It was no longer this unreachable icon, this huge mountain that was impossible to climb, but it was something that in his mind was actually approachable. When this client actually went and asked this woman out, she said yes.
So, start creating images in your mind that work for you, not against you, and trust that what you want to reach is really possible. Trust that you can do anything that you can imagine, and you can imagine anything. To try this, in the description of today's episode, you will find visualizations that will help you reach your goals, that will help you visualize them, and that will work on the set of your beliefs, teaching you that you can really do anything. So, check it out, try it, and if it works, please let me know. Send me a message in the comments or as a private message on social media.
If you liked this episode, although it was a short episode, but if you found it interesting, if you found it helpful, I will be really grateful if you could share it with someone specific or publicly on your social media. I will appreciate it so much. Thank you for being here with me today. Have a wonderful rest of your day and I am looking forward to seeing you again in the next episode. Take care.